Thursday, October 4, 2012

Happy Birthday to Alicia Silverstone, 36. Sure hoping that Vamps turns out to be awesome. Clueless, of course, is one of the great classic movies, and she was terrific in it; she was also just fine in Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost, which almost everyone hated -- but there is a small group of us who loved it. Back to Vamps and Clueless: it really is one of the great tragedies that Amy Heckerling doesn't have a long string of great movies. A major black eye for Hollywood.

4 comments:

I think Romney's strategy of dumping his old policy positions and embracing a large role of the federal government in supporting a social welfare state has fascinating implications for political science. The consensus, as I understand it, has been that a candidate like Romney could not abandon conservative orthodoxy during the general election, since the base would insist on holding his feet to the fire.

But since he was on track to lose the election, it seems that the Republican party and conservative activists are fine giving him free reign to embrace as many liberal policy positions as he wants. He's for an open-ended and endless federal support for education. If states can't cover uninsured poor, he's for the federal government picking up the tab. Heck, he said the main problem with Dodd-Frank was that it wasn't regulating *fast enough*. It's nuts how far Romney strayed from his party in expanding the role of the federal government. The fact that there is no blow-back on him shows how desperate his party is to win.

This isn't to cast blame, though. I entirely understand the bad situation the Republican base is in, being forced to choose between a candidate who will abandon them and a candidate who is the antithesis of their beliefs. But it looks like Romney's drastic embrace of the welfare state and his "You have no choice!" attitude towards the base might actually work.

I think of myself as pretty much a hardcore Christian. Kind of disturbs me the sort of misinformation about the world and about the faith that seems to float through Fellowship Hall. I'm encouraged by President Obama. Sometimes it's hard to understand the visceral reaction a few of the brethren have against him.